If You Want It To Take Hold In Your Mind…

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1:13To claim your match, go to GiveWell.org and pick Daily Stoic from the drop-down menu under podcast. That's how they know that you heard about GiveWell from the Daily Stoic and you'll get your donation matched. That's GiveWell.org, code the Daily Stoic to donate or find out more. Look, if you're listening to this podcast, you've probably heard of HelloFresh, right? They're the number one meal kit in America. They make home cooking easier with chef-crafted recipes and fresh ingredients delivered straight to your door. This fall, they're serving up even more to love. It's not the HelloFresh you remember.

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2:57Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2 ,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at DailyStoic.com. If you want this to take hold in your mind. Marcus Aurelius read Epictetus a lot, and we know this because meditations is proof of it. Almost every page has some direct quote or allusions to Epictetus. We can also find upon deeper inspection references to the works of Panateus, Chrysippus, the plays of Euripides, Zeno, and countless other philosophers.

3:43How does someone develop recall like that? How did he become so wise, not just on the page, but in life? By repetition and practice. Although Marcus Aurelius never refers to Seneca, it's clear that he had absorbed a piece of advice from that stoic too. You must linger on a limited number of master thinkers and digest their works, Seneca wrote, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind. Over and over again, the Stoics poured over the same texts so the ideas could take firm hold so that they could be absorbed, so that it could become muscle memory infused into their DNA. Once?

4:25No, that's not enough. It's about the reading and the rereading, writing and journaling and discussing and reflecting and experiencing. As Epictetus commanded every day and night, keep thoughts like this at hand, write them and read them aloud. talk to yourself and others about them. When I published The Daily Stoic back in 2016, by the way, it's for sale for$1.99 on Amazon as an e-book right now. That's pretty cool. I had no idea it would sell millions of copies and spend hundreds of cumulative weeks on the bestseller list. But that's because it happened to tap into that now timeless Stoic practice of reading and rereading, never stepping in the same river twice.

5:06Marcus would write about how the philosopher is one with their weapon, like a boxer more than a swordsman. A boxer just clenches their fist, a fencer has to go pick something up. And that's what we're trying to do as we study. We're trying to create a practice, get the reps that fuses us with our philosophy, that makes us one with it, that inserts it into our DNA so that we are forever changed by it. And if you want these ideas, these stoic ideas to take hold, firm hold in your mind this year, then you'll have to do more than skim. It's not about reading a book and finishing it. It's not about getting the gist of it as Marcus derided.

5:42It's about making it a part of your life and your mind. It's about lingering and digesting it until it takes firm hold, never to be dislodged. And like I said, the Daily Stoic is$1.99 as an ebook right now. So if there's someone you want to give it to as a gift, if you want to get it in another format, you can grab that on Amazon or anywhere you get your eBooks, I'll link to it in today's show notes. And then also, you know, now that the book's been out for eight years now, I've seen some people's copies there. They're a little worse for wear, like my copy of Meditations, for instance, the front cover is taped back on because I put so many miles on it.

6:19Anyways, if you want a premium edition, one that should stand the test of time, hopefully forever, you can grab the leather edition of the Daily Stoic. Also, that's in the Daily Stoic store. I'll link to that too. Happy New Year, everyone.

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